Chechen-led band uses music as a wary tonic

Dolphins make waves in Russia

Mara D. Bellaby, Associated Press

Published
5:30 am CDT, Sunday, July 11, 2004

MOSCOW - As the singer for Russia’s chart-topping Dead Dolphins, Artur Atsalamov gets plenty of welcome attention. When he ventures into central Moscow, however, it isn’t mobs of fans he keeps a wary eye out for — it’s the police.

Atsalamov is an ethnic Chechen — a nationality often singled out for discrimination, suspicion and harassment in Russia, which has fought two wars with separatist rebels in Chechnya in a decade.

"When I arrived, I had this idea about being the first flower to emerge from a scorched forest," said Atsalamov, 27, whose hometown of Grozny was pulverized in the fighting. "I wanted to show everyone that there is another kind of Chechnya and another kind of Chechen."

The "kind of Chechen" that widely inhabits Russian prejudices after years of fighting and suicide bombings is a terrorist. Police routinely harass people appearing to be of Chechen extraction, whose typically dark complexions or prominent features stand out amid Slavic Russians.

Whenever Atsalamov goes out, he makes sure never to be without money to bribe police when they harass him. Simply in arranging to meet an Associated Press journalist, Atsalamov was cautious about where he felt comfortable going in Moscow’s heavily policed center.

But Dead Dolphins stands out in another way. Its minor-keyed melodies and poetically melancholy lyrics — all the work of Atsalamov — are welcomed by listeners bored with the vapid confections that flood Russian airwaves.

Their single On My Moon hit the top of the charts on Nashe Radio, one of Russia’s hippest stations, and they’ve basked in the approving roar of a crowd of 100,000 at a rock festival.

"I take my hat off to the Dead Dolphins, because to live in Grozny where a real war is going on, a war where people are dying everyday ... and to still play the electric guitar and compose songs, that of course is a feat in and of itself," wrote Russian rock critic Artyom Troitsky.

Music has been Atsalamov’s psychological savior over the decade of Chechnya’s misery. When the first Chechen war started in 1994, his focus was "on how to survive, get somewhere else, set myself up and start writing again," he said.

He grieved over a friend killed by a sniper and learned to sleep to the sound of gunfire. Then, fearful his luck might run out, Atsalamov decided to leave in 1995.

He fled in a bus marked with a white flag. Tanks took halfhearted pot shots at the vehicle as it made its way to neighboring Ingushetia, another republic in southern Russia that is now home to tens of thousands of Chechen refugees.

Ingushetia isn’t immune to violence either: Reports of abductions such as those that plague Chechnya are rising, and before dawn June 22 a series of attacks on security forces killed 98 people.

It was in the Ingush city of Nazran that Atsalamov formed the Dead Dolphins — whose members today include an Ingush and two Russians — and got a first taste of fame.

"We became very popular very quickly because it was new," Atsalamov said. "From the beginning, I knew that we had to go to Moscow."

In the summer of 2000, the band took a crammed bus on a 900-mile trip that ended at the sprawling outdoor market around Moscow’s 80,000-seat Luzhniki stadium.

"We got out at Luzhniki, looked at the stadium and I said, ’Lads, there will come a day when we will play there,’" Atsalamov said. "They wanted to believe me."

He tried in vain to talk the band’s way into the lineup of one of Moscow’s rock festivals. Atsalamov managed to get the band’s self-produced music demo into the hands of Nashe Radio’s chief, and a year later, the festival organizers were calling the Dead Dolphins.